


i live here on my knees

by hermicne (padfooted)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, F/M, For Want of a Nail, unexplained shenigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 18:52:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5676811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/padfooted/pseuds/hermicne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Without help, it had taken years to get over her grief. To face it again now, in the pale grey of his eyes--open eyes, living eyes--was almost too much to bear.</p><p>Alternatively, the one where Cedric comes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i live here on my knees

Writing letters is an exhausting affair. Cho is relieved; her last one of the afternoon is to Michael, reminding him of their meeting tomorrow morning. It is the end of the enforced rest week they’d given her at St. Mungo’s. The director told her it was because she’d been doing such a good job, but Cho knows the truth. After Hogwarts, everyone had assumed that Cho was fragile, that around the time of _his_ death, she grew weepy and incapable of any thought but grief.  

It's true that when he had…gone, Cho had babbled through the tears. Her sixth year was a blur of breakdowns and battles, both with herself and with others. She knows what people say about her; they call her overly dramatic, say that she was weak for mourning. She had been sixteen and demonized for her feelings. It was wrong for her to feel so much sorrow; they’d just been together for less than a year. Get over it, she had been told. There are more important things.

Thus, Cho learned to swallow her tears, to keep a straight face. It helped her during the war and made it easier for the patients at St. Mungo’s to trust such a “serious young woman.”  However, it seems her schoolmates never got over weepy Cho. Without fail, everyone gives her space around the time of year Cedric had died. At first, she’d appreciated it. She had gone through a rollercoaster of emotions those first few years; the loss of him was too much to bear.

After a while, however, Cho had grown annoyed. To everyone, she is mourning personified, a pitiful casualty of the beginning of the war. Their whispers make her little more than a crying woman, though she fought tooth and nail at the Battle of Hogwarts with the best of them. All of this she adds in her letter to Michael, the dull scratch of her quill against the parchment becoming impassioned.   _‘This is truly unprofessional, and I don’t need this sort of special treatment,’_ she writes.

Cho hears someone knock at the door. Their knocking grows insistent; had they no concern for her poor mother? Sighing, she sends the owl on its way and puts on her robe. The boys in their village often play tricks, and the Chang house--with its odd exterior that reminds Cho's parents of _home_ and screams _fresh off the boat_ to Cho--is an easy, prime target.  Her wand is in her pocket; warily, she draws it out, ready for anything as she opens the door.

Except, possibly, her long-lost love.

He looks different. The lines on his face are deeper, his hair shorter than she’d ever seen it. Gone is the Quidditch physique her hands had explored; in its place are the scars of war, the body of a soldier. And yet, he is still so unutterably, ineffably _him_ that it aches. Cho's eyes widen as she stops her tears from falling. She points her wand at the man at her door, who has his hands up, placating. Surrendering.

“If this is your idea of a sick joke, [개새끼](http://archiveofourown.org/works/), go to hell. [엿먹어](http://archiveofourown.org/works/)!” Cho does her best to keep herself from yelling, _screaming_ , but the anger coils itself around her; its vice grip squeezes her lungs. She feels as if she were about to burst.

"Cho," he says simply. His voice is rough, sandpaper and gravel out of place in the neat little home, but he is home to her, and he has come home to her, and Cho, for once, has no fucking clue what to do.

“It can’t be you. It can’t,” she whispers, the lump rising in her throat and threatening to make a scene. She is strong, she tells herself, no longer weak and full of tears. The years have squeezed those out of her.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously this isn't finished, but I have a lot of muse for Cho at the moment, so here this is.


End file.
